WorkHerbert Spencer

The Right to Ignore the State

In chapter nineteen of his first book he argued that a man may quietly withdraw from the state altogether — then cut the chapter from the revised edition.

by Herbert Spencer14 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1850(aged 30)
Original language: English

Report a rights issue

Overview

Nothing here was written to stand on its own. It is chapter nineteen of Social Statics, the treatise John Chapman published for a young sub-editor at The Economist, and it carries the argument of the preceding eighteen chapters one step further than most of his readers wanted. The governing rule of the book is that every person may claim the fullest liberty compatible with the like liberty of everyone else. Turn that rule on government, Spencer says, and it yields a right to refuse: to drop the connection, stop paying towards it, and be no criminal for doing so. He is exact about the price. The man who ignores the state forfeits every claim on it, protection included, and may not complain of what follows. The chapter treats the government of his own day not as a permanent fixture but as a stage in a process leading to something far smaller, and he reached that position without any of the biology he later became famous for. Then he took it out. Chapter nineteen is absent from the revised edition of Social Statics approved in 1892, and he never put it back. The detachment suited it. Reprinted on its own ever since by publishers of the libertarian and anarchist traditions, it has made the pages Spencer suppressed better known than most of the pages he kept — and it is now read by people who will never open the volume it came out of.

Key concepts

What does Spencer mean by the fullest liberty compatible with equal liberty?

Spencer’s rule allows each person the widest freedom that leaves the same freedom available to others. It does not treat liberty as permission to dominate, command, or injure. He uses the principle as a test for government itself: political institutions must justify their interference by the same standard they impose on individuals, rather than receiving a special exemption.

What kind of relationship does Spencer think government creates with its subjects?

Spencer treats government as a connection that a person may enter and leave, not as a permanent condition of human life. That framing denies the state an automatic claim over everyone born within its territory. Government therefore becomes a relationship requiring justification, rather than an institution whose authority survives simply because it has existed.

Why does Spencer’s argument depend on logical consistency?

The argument applies one moral rule without reserving an exception for government. If each person may claim equal liberty, Spencer asks why officials may coerce people in ways that individuals could not rightfully imitate. The state cannot condemn private force while claiming unlimited public force; its authority must meet the same principle it uses to regulate others.

Why does the chapter describe government as a stage in social development?

Spencer presents the government of his time as a temporary form that may give way to something far smaller. This does not merely predict administrative reform; it places political authority within a process rather than treating it as permanent. The chapter’s right to ignore the state therefore points beyond resistance to a social order with less compulsory government.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Refusing the State

Can a person refuse the state's connection without becoming a criminal? The answer tests whether government rests on consent or can claim obedience merely because a majority has established it.

In chapter nineteen of Social Statics, first published in 1850, Spencer applies his rule of equal freedom to government: a person may withdraw, stop paying taxes, and refuse political connection. He takes this against state authority, majority rule, and the assumption that citizenship creates an unconditional moral duty. The choice has a severe consequence: anyone who rejects the state forfeits its protection and cannot complain when it withholds aid. Spencer later removed the chapter from the 1892 revised edition, but republication preserved its anarchist afterlife.

anarchism
state authority
equal freedom
majority rule
coercion
taxation
political morality
civil liberty
religious liberty
civil disobedience

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 14
distinct concepts: 51
by passages held, corpus-wide: #279

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1850 The Right to Ignore the State you are here EN
1851 Social Statics
His first book fixed the political position he defended for the next half-century, and the evolutionary reasoning he tried out here on the poor law grew into a philosophy of the universe.
EN
1852 The Philosophy of Style
It sits between his first book and the psychology that broke his health, and it is a single essay of October 1852, printed in a quarterly.
EN
1855 The Principles of Psychology
Fifteen years on it returned, much enlarged, as a volume of the Synthetic Philosophy — so the edition that carried his psychology to readers is not the one that broke him.
EN
1858 Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative
Read against the Synthetic Philosophy, this is where several of its positions were first stated at magazine length — and where he wrote about music, manners and laughter, which the system had no room for.
EN
1861 Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects
The essays are of the 1850s; the book is of 1911, and Charles W. Eliot, not Spencer, chose its contents — the four on education, set beside pieces on progress, science, manners, laughter and music.
EN
1862 First Principles
Everything else in the Synthetic Philosophy was written to demonstrate the formula set out here, and every later volume argues back to it. Spencer issued it first, when none of what it was meant to govern had yet been written.
EN
1864 Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions
Assembled for America out of the same magazine pieces Spencer was collecting at home in his own Essays, with which it overlaps heavily. It was often the first Spencer an American reader owned.
EN
1873 The Study of Sociology
It stands in front of the three volumes of the sociology as their introduction, arguing that the science is difficult before any of it was attempted. Much the shortest of his sociological writing.
EN
1876 The Principles of Sociology
Three volumes over twenty years, resting on an apparatus Spencer had to build and pay for before he could write them: the Descriptive Sociology tables, which he abandoned before the last volume appeared.
EN
1879 The Data of Ethics
Ethics was where the whole system was meant to arrive, and this is its opening division — issued alone, ahead of the volumes it was supposed to rest on, and later bound in as Part I of The Principles of Ethics.
EN
1886 The Factors of Organic Evolution
Late, and on its own, it argues directly for the mechanism his psychology, his ethics and his sociology all quietly depend on.
EN

— or open another of their works